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Object Timeline

-0001

2007

  • Work on this object began.

2011

  • We acquired this object.

2025

  • You found it!

Graphic Identity, Graphic Identity: Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal

This is a Graphic Identity. It was designed by Matthias Ernstberger and the art director was Stefan Sagmeister and made for (as the client) Porto 2011 and Casa da Música. It is dated 2007 and we acquired it in 2011. Its medium is image (computer generated); moving image (digital video, 2:41 mn; color, sound). It is a part of the Digital department.

Stefan Sagmeister’s 2007 identity campaign for the Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal, is a group of digital documents on a compact disc. The campaign was inspired by the Casa da Música’s iconic building, designed by the Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas. The identity kit includes a video that shows the building’s volume turning in space. The result is six building profiles with 17 different planes that can be applied as logo variations. The Sagmeister team also created a color tool that samples an existing image, such as a painting of Beethoven, to pull 17 different colors that can then fill in the facets of the logo’s planes.
Sagmeister was born in Austria and studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Pratt Institute in New York. After short apprenticeships with Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group and at M & Co., he opened his own firm in New York in 1993, Sagmeister Inc., which has since produced graphics, branding, and packaging for a variety of clients including Levi Strauss & Co., the Guggenheim Museum, and Time Warner Inc. Sagmeister was appointed to the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art and teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts, both in New York City. He has received almost every significant international design award, including the 2005 National Design Award in the field of Communications Design and two Grammys—one that same year for his packaging for the Talking Heads box set, Once in a Lifetime, and a second in 2010 for his packaging for the David Byrne and Brian Eno collaboration, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.
Sagmeister’s graphic production is original and challenges the limits of his profession. This identity campaign, part of a larger group of objects by Sagmeister proposed for acquisition, will augment the museum’s representation of work by this celebrated graphic designer.

This object was donated by Stefan Sagmeister. It is credited Gift of Stefan Sagmeister.

Cite this object as

Graphic Identity, Graphic Identity: Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal; Designed by Matthias Ernstberger; Art Director: Stefan Sagmeister (Austrian, b. 1962); Client: Casa da Música (Portugal), Porto 2011 (Portugal); USA; image (computer generated); moving image (digital video, 2:41 mn; color, sound); Gift of Stefan Sagmeister; 2011-34-4

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<ref name=CH>{{cite web |url=https://www-4.collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/18794271/ |title=Graphic Identity, Graphic Identity: Casa da Música, Porto, Portugal |author=Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |accessdate=12 March 2025 |publisher=Smithsonian Institution}}</ref>